Trump’s End-Game Could Become Ours, Too.

Five large law firms are passing on the opportunity to represent the President after a shakeup last week on his private defense team and as he anticipates giving possible testimony to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Well-known Washington lawyers cited several reasons for declining the President in recent weeks, according to multiple sources familiar with their decisions. Among them: … Lawyers at large firms fear backlash from their corporate clients if they were to represent the President. And many want to steer clear of conflicts of interest that could complicate their other obligations. …

One such firm told CNN: “Any large law firm has clients that have very strong feelings.” The implication was that those are extremely negative feelings about Trump, and that at no large law firm is there any countervailing preponderance of large clients who “have very strong feelings” that are in a positive direction toward him.

If this isn’t a rejection of Trump by the rest of the U.S. aristocracy, and an expression of their determination to replace him by Mike Pence, then nothing could be. They want Trump out.

The reader-comments to that story, which are posted at reddit, don’t even mention Pence, nor America’s aristocracy, nor billionaires’ control over this country, nor nuclear war, nor any of the other significant implications of the news-story, nor even the major back-story to it, but these important aspects of this news-item, will be discussed and documented here.

The people in actual power had originally evaluated Trump’s Presidential candidacy only on the basis of what he said on the campaign trail, because he had never actually served in any public office. And, so, they feared him, solely on account of his words, and Hillary Clinton received vastly more big-dollar donations than he did. Though some of her campaign promises were moderately opposed to what billionaires want, she had had a long and consistent record of ‘public’ service, including as a U.S. Senator and as Secretary of State, serving actually billionaires, at the expense of the public, and so they didn’t really care what she said in her campaigns, because they knew, from actual experience with her, that she would be loyal to them. But not so with Trump. They’ve wanted him forced out of office, ever since he first entered office.

Nothing in Vice President Mike Pence’s background suggests that the policies (which is all that the people in actual power care about — they don’t care about bumper-stickers or campaign speeches or other mere words) which a President Pence would pursue, would be any different from those which President Trump has already been pursuing. Pence has a long and consistent record in public offices, and it’s supportive of the mega-corporate agenda. For example, he has never said (far less done) anything at all like what Trump had promised before he became President (but hasn’t yet acted on):

Months before that time, Trump had said: “I think Assad is a bad guy, a very bad guy, all right? Lots of people killed. I think we are backing people we have no idea who they are. The rebels, we call them the rebels, the patriotic rebels. We have no idea. A lot of people think, Hugh, that they are ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can’t be fighting ISIS and fighting Assad. Assad is fighting ISIS. He is fighting ISIS. Russia is fighting now ISIS. And Iran is fighting ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can’t go — and I watched Lindsey Graham, he said, I have been here for 10 years fighting. Well, he will be there with that thinking for another 50 years. He won’t be able to solve the problem. We have to get rid of ISIS first. After we get rid of ISIS, we’ll start thinking about it. But we can’t be fighting Assad. And when you’re fighting Assad, you are fighting Russia, you’re fighting — you’re fighting a lot of different groups. But we can’t be fighting everybody at one time.”

Fighting against “radical Islamic terrorism,” however, isn’t nearly as profitable for firms such as Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics, as nuclear weapons systems — the anti-Russia weapons, the strategic weapons systems — are. The military-industrial complex had needed the 9/11 boost back in 2000, when the possibility of shrinking ‘defense’ budgets was a real threat they faced; but, after over a decade of the military contractors having been carried along by that boost, they needed to go back to some kind of ‘Cold War’, even without any communism or Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact. Obama gave them that enormous boost, of a returned ‘Cold War’, by his coup overthrowing the democratically elected Government of Ukraine (on Russia’s doorstep) in February 2014 (and some of that Obama-operation’s mercenaries even recently described in detail their participation in the coup), and America’s government contractors have boomed enormously ever since the coup, as a result of that coup and of the resulting restored ‘Cold War’.

But restoring the ‘Cold War’ isn’t the only thing they demand, and which he has supplied but they fear he still might reverse them on: There’s also the fossil fuels industries, and the sickness industries, and others, often having the same investors as do military contractors.

Her record did show that she represented those lobbyists, not the public. Trump couldn’t even have won the Republican nomination if he hadn’t verbally supported those polices and gone even beyond them, promised to out-do Hillary; but, unlike Hillary, he didn’t have any actual record.

“‘If, for whatever reason, the Congress doesn’t pass health care reform, I believe, and I may be totally off base on this, but I believe that by the year 2000 we will have a single payer system,’ she said. ‘I don’t even think it’s a close call politically. I think the momentum for a single payer system will sweep the country. … It will be such a huge popular issue … that even if it’s not successful the first time, it will eventually be.’”

Back in 1994, she was citing single-payer as being a threat — never a goal. Wall Street knew where she stood, even if her voters didn’t.

Moreover, when Donald Trump forced into the Republican platform a restoration of the Democratic Glass-Steagall Act, this was his statement, not something that somebody else forced upon him. He knew that doing this would antagonize Wall Street, but he did it anyway. Trump actually said he wanted to ‘break up the big banks’. On 9 August 2016, the far-right American Enterprise Institute headlined “How Can Trump Support Deregulation and Glass-Steagall?” and opened by saying, “The Republican platform’s proposal to reinstate Glass-Steagall is hard to understand, even in the confused policy mishmash created by Donald Trump. The best interpretation is that it’s an awkward outreach to the disappointed ‘progressive’ supporters of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The worst is that it calls into question whether Donald Trump really supports financial deregulation.”

Even as President, Trump still hasn’t indicated whether he actually intends to push for that.

Other than on Glass-Steagall, he hasn’t as President been at all supportive of any of those progressive campaign positions which had terrified America’s political mega-donors. Mike Pence, even with his long record in public offices, has never — not even by mere words — supported any of those positions.

Trump, as the President, has done everything, both in words and far more importantly in policies, to satisfy his extremely wealthy opponents; but, evidently, it has all been to no avail; they still want Pence to replace Trump.

The U.S. aristocracy, whom Trump has been bending over backwards to satisfy, are now checkmating him.

He has only two choices: Go gracefully, and quit, or else go down fighting the military, whom he has done everything he could to accommodate. The latter option would be suicidal for him. The former option would be terminal for the entire world.

He’s a psychopath, but he also has an ego. He can’t preserve his ego without turning against the very people whom he has, until now, been serving: the generals, the neocons, Lockheed Martin, the Sauds, the sickness industries, etc.

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